John Lukacs’s Valediction

This is the best introduction to the historical craft of John Lukacs. History and the Human Condition does not replace the much longer Remembered Past, a wide-ranging selection of Lukacs’s works also published by ISI Books. But this work, a coda to the author’s career, contains just the right mixture of reflection and nostalgia (true nostalgia, Lukacs says, “is a desire less for a time than for a place”), addressing new and old historical problems, that it should serve well to draw a new generation of readers under his spell.

Lukacs has already influenced and inspired (and sometimes, infuriated) three generations of accomplished historians despite never having taught at prestigious universities where he could sequester graduate students and make disciples of them. Russell Kirk applauded his Historical Consciousness, especially its “moral imagination” and nuanced arguments against all philosophies of history. Forrest McDonald, meeting Lukacs for the first time—I happened to introduce them—discussed with him how their thinking about history had reached similar conclusions and praised Historical Consciousness as an elegant statement of those conclusions. Stephen Tonsor, Clyde Wilson, Richard Gamble, and many others have expressed their debt to his art. The distinguished Robert H. Ferrell, slightly older than Lukacs and not very often in agreement with him, wrote an essay, “Appreciating Lukacs,” that must have mystified the Hofstadters and Schlesingers of the mainstream historical profession.

One of the essays in this volume is on Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: “The Vital Center Did Not Hold.” While wishing no ill to a man who appears to have had a “pleasant career,” Lukacs nevertheless sums up Schlesinger’s life’s work—and thus probably three-quarters of the work of his generation—by noting “the rapid decline of the appeal of liberalism, and the attraction and the force of a populist nationalism—the cult of the people and of the military power of the nation, the meaning of which Schlesinger cannot comprehend or perhaps even discern.”

Such insights were what first drew me to Lukacs’s writings, when I was a young historian at the end of the ’60s thoroughly disabused of the Great Liberal Idea of Progress and trying to make sense of the cultural mess that decade was making of my chosen profession.

I first read Lukacs’s The Passing of the Modern Age, thrilling to it almost as much as to Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. At Kirk’s suggestion, I then spent several weeks studying Historical Consciousness, which changed my life as a teacher. Its central insight—at least to a young scholar seeking a way to frame U.S. history that would counter the great myths of the land of opportunity, the primacy of the individual over real community, liberal internationalism, and the emerging nexus of the race-class-gender “social” history—was that a sound understanding of human nature precludes the need for a philosophy of history. Schlesinger once quoted Pascal as saying that “man is neither angel nor brute,” which Lukacs calls a “safe, liberal, gray, centrist view of human nature. To the contrary: man is both angel and brute.”

Such distinctions, and Lukacs is a lover of distinctions, demand that we study history according to truths that are beyond the ability of man to manipulate and that are rooted in his nature. One consequence of this Christian view of man—in Lukacs’s case, this Catholic view—is that we must study real people, not categories of people. His critics, and many of his friends, have labeled John Lukacs a proponent of the “Great Man” theory of history. There is some truth to this, especially in the books for which he is best known—those about Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt controlling the destiny of the world in World War II—but it is only a half-truth and can cause readers to misunderstand what he means by studying real people.

In the selections “A Tocqueville Tide,” “The Germans’ Two Wars: Heisenberg and Bohr,” and “The World Around Me: My Adopted Country” presented here, Lukacs may not exactly say with Emerson that “all history is biography,” but he comes rather close. It is important to Lukacs to understand the details of Tocqueville’s life, to understand that the “history of science not only is inseparable from the history of scientists; it is the history of scientists.” How can we comprehend the history of mankind if we cannot comprehend what moves its men and women? The Terrible Simplifiers are those for whom categories and statistics and “forces” are the stuff of our common story.

This volume also introduces a great theme of Lukacs’s work: the 20th century gave us not the struggle of democracy and communism, not the impending victory of liberal capitalism, but two great choices: nationalism and socialism, and the greatest of these was nationalism.

One of his criticisms of American “conservatives”—he usually uses quotation marks—is that they often conflate patriotism with populist nationalism: “It may be enough to say that patriotism is defensive, while nationalism is aggressive; that patriotism means the love of a country, while nationalism is the cult of a people (and of the power of their state).”

This distinction helps explain why Lukacs understands Hitler to have been more dangerous than Stalin, why he is critical of the conservative hero Reagan, and why he became so close a friend, even a soul mate, to George Kennan. What Lukacs calls “the militarization of popular imagination” has led inexorably to the imperial presidency and massive growth of the state, even as liberal and socialist ideas are dying.

The sense of place Lukacs so lovingly feels for his household—and Schuylkill Township and Chester County and Pennsylvania—he finds replaced by the false patriotism, and therefore false conservatism, of servile nationalists. There is a caveat to this observation, however: the Hungarian-born Lukacs does love his adopted country, and “many things that I saw were not what many others saw… democratic surfaces are big and thick. Sometimes I was wrong.”

Here, a note of personal interest to me. Lukacs praises the great American historian of modern Europe Carlton J.H. Hayes for his understanding of the cultural unity of “Atlantic civilization.” Hayes was also the founder of the study of nationalism, and he made many of the distinctions between patriotism and nationalism that Lukacs now insists upon. Hayes, who was discarded by liberals for his common sense about the materialism of the modern age and for his prudence about Spain in World War II and the early Cold War, deserves the recognition that Lukacs wants him to have.

Hayes and Kennan share another of Lukacs’s passions. In my favorite selection in this book, “History as Literature,” Lukacs asks, “Is history literature or science?” He answers boldly, “Well—it is literature rather than science. And so it should be. For us.” In a footnote, he quotes approvingly from a letter written to him by Kennan: “I view every work of narrative history as a work of the creative imagination, like the novel, but serving a somewhat different purpose and responsive to different, more confining rules.”

Lukacs insists, “the choice of every word is not only an aesthetic or a technical but a moral choice.” The consciousness of a historian involves more than “facts,” which are themselves limited, and should be informed by right reading, especially of literature. “Our knowledge of history,” Lukacs says, “is of course less than the entire past, but it is also more than the recorded past.” The best historians do not become slaves of “categorical idealism” but cultivate what Russell Kirk and T.S. Eliot called the moral imagination. Historians, once they learn this truth, may even be the leaders in bringing light to what otherwise could become a new Dark Age.

John Lukacs is well known not so much for speaking truth to power as speaking truth to audiences he senses have settled into safe and unexamined opinions. This has earned him, among friends and critics alike, a somewhat curmudgeonly reputation. I trust, however, that readers of this admirable introduction to one of the true creative geniuses of his profession will recognize not only Lukacs’s passion for truth but a certain humility born of his profound understanding of human nature—and the sweetness as well as the fearlessness of a gentleman.

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10 Responses to John Lukacs’s Valediction

Seems fair to say that socialist ideas are dying, as well as socialist practice. The last two “socialist countries”, Cuba and North Korea, are both hereditary monarchies.

But liberal ideas and practice? Every developed country in the world is now a welfare state; and nobody’s going back. Most ban discrimination in employment and public accommodations based on race, gender, and religion; and nobody’s going back. The underlying liberal ideas aren’t dead — they’ve become the commonplaces of our societies.

Very interesting review and mini-bio, Professor, thank you. I don’t believe I’ve ever read a book by John Lukacs, but I’ve perused a number of his magazine articles. Perhaps this book should be next on my reading list.

I agree with Lukacs that “conservative” is deserving of the quote marks in as dynamic a society as our modern one is, and that his self-description as a “reactionary” is appropriate in many ways. (For that matter, “liberal”, when not used in the classical sense, is a very poor term for what is often a quasi-socialist ideology.) However, I can’t agree with him on his remark on nostalgia. We can re-visit our childhood home, but not our childhood.

I’m not clear that nationalism and socialism were the two great forces of the 20th century. There were quite a few others. Speaking of the paragraph in which you discuss that, I believe that you should have written “the greater of these” rather than “the greatest of these”, as you were comparing two rather than three or more. Of course, you may have been including the various forces which preceded the big two, in which case my criticism is invalid. Lukacs himself made such an error of number in an essay of his I just read. He was speaking of communism, liberal democracy, and Fascism-National Socialism (which last two he otherwise distinguishes), saying that WWII had destroyed the “latter”, rather than last.

He was brilliant 40 years ago, saying things that nobody else had thought or said or could think or say — and many of those insights had begun to germinate 30 years before that, in the dark years of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Go back to Historical Consciousness or The Last European War and see for yourself.

Unfortunately repeating the same ideas for the last 40 years hasn’t helped Lukacs to maintain the reputation he’d achieved. Lamenting the end of an older European bourgeois world a century or so after its fall may be giving too much of oneself over to nostalgia and falling for an overly rosy picture of an epoch that had its uglier aspects.

Viewing every conflict in decades of American politics through the lens of the late 1930s also hasn’t been always been that enlightening. The returns start to diminish after a while. Is it really always a matter of socialism versus nationalism, or patriotism versus nationalism, or the decent liberal bourgeoisie versus whatever vile nationalist creatures came afterward?

The objection might be that true thoughts or perceptions don’t really age or become irrelevant, but the problem with that is that historical periods, as Lukacs tells us in his earlier books, can’t always be compared so exactly or mechanically, and such insights aren’t quite absolutes.

Movements or ideologies or political tendencies relate as much to historical circumstances as to anything lasting outside or above history. In analyzing movements or ideologies, the differences between eras matter as much as any underlying ideal categories. Lukacs the theorist of history understood all that, but sometimes it gave Lukacs the polemicist trouble.

Maybe I object because Lukacs challenges my assumptions and threatens my own world view, but over the last few decades he really hasn’t been as challenging intellectually as he once was — more the bludgeon than the stiletto.

I believe that John Willson’s use of the superlative rather than the comparative degree is an allusion to the Apostle Paul’s wording when speaking of the theological virtues in 1 Corinthians.

My understanding of Lukacs’ theme, from earlier writings of his, is that it is not so much that the twentieth century saw a choice between nationalism and socialism but that it saw the combination of the two triumph over everything else to become the standard. I could be mistaken. I look forward to reading this new volume.

I think you are wrong on this. You can only visit what your childhood home has become. Not only that, the sensual connections of your visit will be thinned by your adult, experienced-filled brain. I take this a step further. Experientially, we are severed from our true past. We know it only by the stories we tell ourselves and those told to us, and both sources change over time. All of this is true in a larger context. I am 74 and have been a conservative of some sort all my life. I am no more the conservative I was in the 60s than the conservative movement is the same as then. This, in spite of what sociologists like Dan Kahan, Lawrence Rosenthal, and Theda Skocpol attempt to prove with their bias-laced research.

This is the second time TAC has done a write up on an author as I’m reading his work. Close to finishing his BUDAPEST 1900 and really enjoying it. It’s sat on my home shelf since I failed to read it before a short stint working on Hungary. Glad I picked it up, it’s really been an enjoyable read that really transports you to a different past world. In this case, much of my family were Jewish Budapestians (with all that entails), and it is very interesting to see where they would have fit into the tapestry of the Hungarian metropolis at that time.

I would have to read Lukacs more seriously than to swallow the presumption of this review, which is that “The more things change, the more they remain the same,” is NOT true.

It is proposed here that nationalism has replaced patriotism in modern American life, which rather self-referentially indicts American conservatism, and what current activities constituting it comprise contemporary historical change.

As a cinemaphile, I think the best refutation of this argument is the Leo McCarey film, “My Son John”. If you watch it carefully, you can argue that conservative patriotism became nationalism a long, long time ago, in the god old days. So whatever became of Goldwater and Reagan?

The film is about an American wonder boy who is eventually done in as a fellow traveller, and the relationship with his parents. His father is an obviously nationalistic rather than patriotic institution(played by Dean Jagger) who even sings jingoistic elks lodge songs ( a rare treat, the only other film document I can recall of a gory patriotic ditty was the Soviet ouvre, “I am Cuba”).

The mother (Helen Hayes) has no particular beliefs or convictions, and no latent patriotism, but a real lack of self recognition, as she senses her world is disappearing (time prevents me from elaborating here). But the son (Robert Walker Sr.) is not really an out-and-out communist, and therefore no mockery, counterpoint, or even challenge to his parent’s Americanism or sense of normalcy. Rather, he is someone of n clear inner convictions, but of many talents and hazy ambitions, who fell down the slippery sloop of internationalism, liberalism, and all the baggage recognized by Whittaker Chambers.

Now, what am I to conclude from this document? Either that patriotism is always nationalism, or that claims of nationalism are a blinder to the truth of human nature, a sorrow attempt to drown out the warning calls of real threats. I believe the latter, especially as I reflect on the sensibility of this film and director, and the clear vision of what people must have felt in the “bad old” 1950’s

A picture is indeed worth a thousand words. Could it be that the picture of Tea Party nationalism is but a caricature with a hidden agenda, against a people in real pain, with real enemies?

Sorry I’m so late in writing back. I agree with your individual points, but I don’t see how they invalidate mine. What your childhood home has become over the years seems to me a function of time far more than of place.

We are living in a time of rapid technological change, Stephen, we have for our whole lives. (I’m a few months shy of 61 myself.) But to illustrate my point here, let us say that we go back to a time when the pace was much slower, perhaps seemingly non-existent, such as medieval or ancient times in most settings. If you were your present age back then, and could return to your former home town after having left it for, say, a bigger city, you would find it looking much the same as when you were a boy there. The children would be much the same type of youngsters you’d grown up with. But they wouldn’t be those children, even if many were related to your boyhood friends, not many of these latter still being alive, in all likelihood. And it would be that way across the earth, however little changed the places were otherwise.

Getting back to our time: yes, the kids of today have many playthings that we didn’t have, and have different attitudes than we did. And unlike earlier times, there have been substantial changes in many a town or city. But are those changes really what make us sigh nostalgically? Are we, in short, really so different from those of earlier times?

At some point, Lukacs stopped writing history and was just a mythologizer.

Particularly about how the “duel” between Churchill and Hitler was a cosmic battle of archetypes. Through this trope, it became obvious that Lukacs was using the popularity of “all things Hitler” or WW2, simply to promote his personal views & philosophy — which few would even bother with lacking the persistent attraction of WW2.

He actually became quite absurd about it, with a string of books progressively narrowing around the timeline of Churchill & Hitler’s epochal clash. Just so he could opine so tiresomely the same “world-weary” nonsense, the same little aphorisms and bon mots.

I stopped reading him long ago, as a gesture of pity, like a severely faded vaudeville act. How could publishers let him — who seems like a decent enough person — go from book to book, embarrassing himself? Scandalous.